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One of the frontiers of nanotechnology is advancing beyond the periodic self-assembly of materials. Icosahedral quasicrystals, aperiodic in all directions, represent one of the most challenging targets that have yet to be experimentally…
In contrast to most self-assembling synthetic materials, which undergo unbounded growth, many biological self-assembly processes are self-limited. That is, the assembled structures have one or more finite dimensions that are much larger…
Nanoparticles tethered with DNA strands are promising building blocks for bottom-up nanotechnology, and a theoretical understanding is important for future development. Here we build on approaches developed in polymer physics to provide…
Despite tremendous progress in the research on self-assembled nanotechnological building blocks such as macromolecules, nanowires, and two-dimensional materials, synthetic self-assembly methods bridging nanoscopic to macroscopic dimensions…
We use a coarse-grained model of DNA-functionalized particles to understand the role of DNA chain length on their self-assembly. We find that the increasing chain length for a given particle size decreases the propensity to form ordered…
Self-assembly is one of the most promising strategies for making functional materials at the nanoscale, yet new design principles for making self-limiting architectures, rather than spatially unlimited periodic lattice structures, are…
We present a quantitative measure of physical complexity, based on the amount of information required to build a given physical structure through self-assembly. Our procedure can be adapted to any given geometry, and thus to any given type…
Just like atoms combine into molecules, colloids can self-organize into predetermined structures according to a set of design principles. Controlling valence -- the number of inter-particle bonds -- is a prerequisite for the assembly of…
In micro- and nano-scale systems, particles can be moved by using an external force like gravity or a magnetic field. In the presence of adhesive particles that can attach to each other, the challenge is to decide whether a shape is…
In equilibrium self-assembly, microscopic building blocks spontaneously self-organize into stable structures as dictated by their interaction potentials, which limits the accessible structural features to those that correspond to global…
Elastic sheets with macroscopic dimensions are easy to deform by bending and stretching. Yet shaping nanometric sheets by mechanical manipulation is hard. Here we show that nanoparticle self-assembly could be used to this end. We…
A challenge of molecular self-assembly is to understand how to design particles that self-assemble into a desired structure and not any of a potentially large number of undesired structures. Here we use simulation to show that a strategy of…
We present a theoretical discussion of a self-assembly scheme which makes it possible to use DNA to uniquely encode the composition and structure of micro- and nanoparticle clusters. These anisotropic DNA-decorated clusters can be further…
Biological materials are self-assembled with near-atomic precision in living cells, whereas synthetic 3D structures generally lack such precision and controllability. Recently, DNA nanotechnology, especially DNA origami technology, has been…
The self-assembly of polymer grafted nanoparticles is more and more used in the field of functional materials. However, there is still a lack of analysis on the dynamic transformation paths of different self-assembly morphologies, which…
The rapid progress in precisely designing the surface decoration of patchy colloidal particles offers a new, yet unexperienced freedom to create building entities for larger, more complex structures in soft matter systems. However, it is…
Self-assembly of nanoscale synthetic subunits is a promising bottom-up strategy for fabrication of functional materials. Here, we introduce a design principle for DNA origami nanoparticles of 50-nm size, exploiting modularity, to make a…
A fundamental characteristic of matter is its ability to form ordered structures under the right thermodynamic conditions. Predicting these structures - and their properties - from the attributes of a material's building blocks is the holy…
Particle shape is a critical parameter that plays an important role in self-assembly, for example, in designing targeted complex structures with desired properties. In the last decades an unprecedented range of monodisperse nanoparticle…
Self-assembly is a fundamental concept in biology and of significant interest to nanotechnology. Significant progress has been made in characterizing and controlling the properties of the resulting structures, both experimentally and…